Chugga

Chugga became our hero in third grade and he passed into myth in eighth grade. Chugga wasn't a Catholic, but his parents sent him to school with us anyway. In third grade, one early fall afternoon, Sister Mary Grace was going down the line hitting each of us on our up-turned palms with a large wooden ruler. She swung the ruler at Chugga's hand when, poof, he pulled it away and Sister hit herself in the leg. We all laughed. Of course, Chugga was marched down the hall where Sister Mary Bertha made him kneel down, smacked him across the face with her hand and then struck both of his hands with the ruler. I don't remember what he'd done wrong in eighth grade, but Sister Bertha, all 4' 8" of her, yanked all 5' 11" of skinny Chugga out of his desk and dragged him across the hall into the bathrooms. He told us after school how she had made him take down his pants and she got her rocks off by beating him on his ass and back with a piece of oak wood that was the foot rest from the back of a student's desk. The board was over a foot long, four inches wide and over an inch thick. Chugga told us that Big Bertha had broken the board while smacking him across the back.